Sony’s online gaming service is not having a great week.
PlayStation Network is once again experiencing issues, confirms Sony. The company tweeted to its followers that it is aware of the problems, and the company said it’s engineers are working on them. This comes after a distributed denial-of-service attack knocked PSN offline for much of Sunday. Today’s issues are not as severe as Sunday’s outage, and it isn’t affecting any other services.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1537379,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"B"}']We’ve asked Sony whether today’s problems are related to the DDoS attack from over the weekend, and we’ll update this post with any new information.
https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/504278007716929536
On Sunday, a self-proclaimed hacker or group of hackers called Lizard Squad took credit for attacking PSN as well as Diablo III publisher Blizzard’s games, mulitplayer online arena battler League of Legends, and action role-playing game Path of Exile. All of these games and services experienced disruptions. Yesterday, the attack spread to Xbox Live.
In addition to the cyberattacks, Lizard Squad claimed it made a bomb threat that forced an American Airlines flight from Dallas heading to San Diego carrying Sony Online Entertainment boss John Smedley to reroute to Phoenix.
“The flight landed without incident,” a spokesperson for the national press office at the Federal Bureau of Investigation told GamesBeat. “After a brief stop in Phoenix, the flight continued on to San Diego, arriving at approximately 5:15 p.m. Pacific time. Federal law provides severe penalties for threatening or interfering with the operation of an aircraft. The FBI investigation into this incident continues.”
The DDoS attacks likewise are illegal if they cause more than $5,000 worth of losses to the targets. Considering the amount of money things like PSN and League of Legends make from content sales, these attacks likely surpassed that.